


RED

by TautochroneGrave



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Leorio is only mentioned, Nonbinary Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Short One Shot, Trans Kurapika, mentions of suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27828706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TautochroneGrave/pseuds/TautochroneGrave
Summary: Kurapika takes a train ride to their next assignment and is left with their thoughts of grief. Heavy angst.
Kudos: 11





	RED

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InconcinnusCorvus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InconcinnusCorvus/gifts).



> I write Kurapika with they/them pronouns unapologetically. If you see other pronouns used after they are mentioned it is because they are referring to another person.

Kurapika takes the dead escalator two steps at a time at the station. When they make it up the platform, the train they thought they were missing comes to a stop on the opposite side. A single drop of sweat drips down the side of their face out from a beanie. Kurapika wipes the sweat with their finger, then pulls the beanie off and shakes it out, mad like the sweat came from it and not their own head. Kurapika looks down the tracks and breathes out a breath, watching it rise then disappear. The platform reeks of cigarette smoke and passively they wish they could have one. Expect, cigarettes tire them out. They don’t invigorate. They wish aptly for a drug that works the way alcohol does. The way too much smoking does. Kurapika refuses to indulge. Nothing works.

Kurapika looks across the tracks at graffiti scrawled on the wall in that little crawl space underneath the platform. They’ve been seeing it for months all over the city. _Pyro_ , scrawled between great red and orange flames from the backs of buses to the sides of mail boxes. Kurapika couldn’t seem to escape this tag.

The first time they’d gone out of the safety of their clans land they saw someone tag a wall near the shopping district. The kid was in the back. It was foggy. Kurapika saw the kid and then the kid saw them. One of the first lessons forced into them when they started wanting to leave the grounds, you don’t stare, you don’t even glance, but you don’t totally not look either. Out of respect you acknowledge. You look and don’t look. Anything to avoid the question: _whatchyoulookingat_?

There is no good answer for the question. Being asked this question means they’d already fucked up. Kurapika had waited for their moment, watching the kid tag in the damp bricks four letters: _i spi_. To Kurapika at the time it reminded them of the children's game, but now the memory was linked to something more sinister. Something about watching the kid scrawl between the wet stones sparked approval from Kurapika. Watching another push outside of the lines they had been given, and knowing that it also wouldn’t last. Much like the graffiti in front of them now.

The head of the train and then its body appear, wind around the bend toward the station. Self-loathing hits you fast sometimes. They don’t know for a second if they might jump, get down there on the tracks, wait for the fast weight to come get rid of them. Kurapika would probably jump late, bounce off to the side and fuck up their face. Perfectly anti-climatic.

On the train Kurapika thinks of the looming panel of dons they’re going to meet. They keep picturing these guys twenty feet up staring down at them. With long wild faces, sharp hooked fingers and beady eyes staring down directly asking: _what are you?_

Everyone on the train is looking at their phones. Into them. Kurapika looks to their left and sees an old man slumped down in his seat. The old guy comes to and sits up straight, then moves his arms around like he’s checking to make sure all his stuff is still with him, even though there’s nothing there. Kurapika walks to the next train car. They stand at the door and look out the window. The train floats alongside the freeway next to the streaking red lights of cars. Each of their speeds is different: the speed of the cars is short, disconnected, sporadic. Kurapika and the train slither along the tracks as one movement and speed. There’s something cinematic about their variable speeds, like a moment in a movie that makes you feel something for reasons you can’t explain. Something too big to feel, underneath, and inside, too familiar to recognize, right there in front of you at all times. Kurapika exhales a breath as it fogs over their reflection in the window.

Grief was the only living family Kurapika had remaining. It greeted them every morning with a trickle of light through the windows of the train. It sat at the bottom of a coffee cup in the dregs and ignited in the pit of their stomach. It flowed into control the moment the safety on their pistol flicked and bullet shells rain heavily to the ground. Grief did not spare any thoughts to the owner of the drying blood in the grip of the pistol, beneath the beds of their nails, and on the cuffs of their shirt sleeve.

There’s a guy standing across the aisle of the train. Kurapika hates who they think the guy is. Who he has to be. Beard wild and out of control, head shaved meticulously in a way that highlighted the complete lack of a hair line. The guy was bald in a way that showed an obsessive precision that removed the remaining hair growth every morning. Arrogance glowing behind thick framed glasses that remind them of another arrogant pain in the neck they know.

Kurapika remembers the blinking red light of their phone, an omniscient reminder of the dozens of unread messages. The light pierced them every time it blinked and they couldn’t bring themselves to open the offending indication. There were eyes blinking with every voicemail. Text messages. Buttons on shirts. Dresses.

Red lights were the ghosts of eyes everywhere they went. An eye appears on the flag for the country of Japan. A red sun with a white barrier boxing it in. Kurapika bitterly considers how each remnant of their clan, too, is boxed in for display like the white cloth background of the red sun motif. Each time the cloth waves in the wind, its shape waves to them as the symbol of a stolen treasure.

Red eyes flared with the brakes of the cars they watched through the train window. Whenever a vehicle would slow to a halt and especially in a collision the lights burned into Kurapikas' skin as another ghost of their clan.

This one color unequivocally meant many things across their life. When they were a child red meant the truth. A color they could recognize as their own and one which always spoke honestly that words tried to hide. When others would see Kurapikas' red, the color meant shame mixed with fury. They were not supposed to get caught. Not even once.

In literature red was the color of life. In society red was the color associated with love and passion. For Kurapika, red lives as the tragedy soaked into the soil beneath their shoes. It sinks into the roots of wilderness, mixing with the waters of the river, carrying the lives of their clan away with the current.;

Red is the color their hands remained until they properly lay their clan members to rest.

Kurapika shoves their hand in their coat pocket. Blinking back between the memory and the present. They forgot their contacts _and now Pairo’s on the ground._

_They forgot to bring back lunch for Pairo and now he’s on the ground._

_Kurapika saw Pairos' bloody palm and now he’s on the ground._

_Kurapika forgot to draw their swords and now they’re on the ground._

When Kurapika gets into the building, they check their phone and see that they’ve got fifteen minutes before next check in. They take off their undershirt without taking off their top layer in order to use it as a kind of rag to swipe what sweat they can before they go in front of the dons.

The dents in the metal door to their room show how long this building has housed this type of life.  
There are bullet shells around the windows and makeshift ashtrays from empty cans and soda cans. There’s nothing in this room that is unfamiliar to them at this point. Nothing that will make it safe. Their clan was secretive for its own safety, it didn’t save them in the end, and neither will a steel door.

Grief may be the only connection they still have but Kurapika knew more than bone aching sorrow. They knew anger was an infection. One that currently was spreading to all ends of their body even when they’re trying to remember what the laughter of a friend sounds like.

Kurapika watches the minutes tick by on their phone screen. Motionless as another alert buzzes and disappears. Through the door Kurapika hears a muttering just slightly out of pace to be one of the regulars in the building. It’s pitched just enough that it sounds almost like his native tongue, but it never is.


End file.
